No Air

The image on the left shows a pair of lungs from a mouse foetus, a couple of days before birth. If you look carefully you can see the network of delicate branching tubes that draw in air, sending it down to tiny sacs called alveoli. It’s here where vital oxygen moves into the bloodstream and waste carbon dioxide passes back out. But there's something very wrong with the lungs on the right, taken from an animal at the same age. The regular branches have failed to sprout, thanks to a fault in a gene called Ext1, so these mice can’t breathe properly after they’re born. Ext1 works together with a well-known gene called Sonic hedgehog, which sends signals in developing organs that help them grow into the correct structures. The discovery reveals more about how lungs grow, and what has gone wrong when human babies’ lungs don’t develop properly.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from work by Hua He and Meina Huang, and colleagues
• State Key Laboratory of Genetic Engineering, Institute of Genetics, Collaborative Innovation Center of Genetics and Development, School of Life Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Genetics, August 2017